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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part II

In a
previous post I examined the late Hilary Putnam’s engagement with the
Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition on a topic in the philosophy of mind. Let’s now look at what Putnam had to say
about Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas in natural theology. In his 1997 paper “Thoughts Addressed to
an Analytical Thomist” (which appeared in an issue of The Monist devoted to the topic of analytical Thomism), Putnam
tells us that while he is not an analytical Thomist, as “a practicing Jew” he
could perhaps be an “analytic Maimonidean.”
The remark is meant half in jest, but that there is some truth in it is
evident from what Putnam says about the topics of proofs of God’s existence,
divine simplicity, and theological language.

Putnam is
not unsympathetic to some of the traditional arguments for God’s existence,
such as those defended by Aquinas and Maimonides. He rejects the assumptions,
common among contemporary secular academic philosophers, that such arguments
are uniformly invalid, question-begging, or otherwise fallacious, and that it
is absurd even to try to prove God’s existence.
He notes the double standard such philosophers often bring to bear on
this subject:

[T]he majority of these philosophers
take it to be quite clear what a “proof” is: a demonstration that something is
the case using the standards (or supposed standards) of, if not science, then,
let us say, analytic philosophy. In
addition, it is supposed that a sound proof ought to be able to convince any
rational person who sees it. (Why the
arguments of analytic philosophers themselves -- not even the philosophical, as
opposed to technical logical, arguments of Frege, or Russell, or Quine, or Davidson,
or David Lewis -- all fail to meet this test is not something that analytical
philosophers discuss a great deal.) (pp. 487-88)

Putnam also
says that “the view that the traditional proofs are fallacious rests, I think,
on a straw-man idea of what those proofs are” (p. 488). In fact, he holds, “each of the traditional
proofs can be stated in a form in which it proceeds validly from its premisses
[and] ones which… are not simply question-begging…” even if an atheist would
not accept the premises (Ibid.). In particular, Putnam thinks that causal
proofs like those of Maimonides and Aquinas can be given such a form. And he thinks that the proofs’ contention
that any ultimate explanation of the world of contingent things requires a
necessary cause, and that this necessity is not merely conceptual, reflects “a
very natural conception of reason itself” which “expresses intuitions which are
very deep in us” and that the notion that modern science has somehow “refuted”
these intuitions “deserves critical examination” (p. 489).

Indeed, in
Putnam’s view, the notion that science has refuted religion reflects “a deeply
confused understanding of what real religious belief is,” because religious belief is not a matter of trying to explain
or predict this or that particular empirical phenomenon, and because theological
and scientific modes of description are “incommensurable” (though he cautions
that he does not mean to be bringing to bear everything Thomas Kuhn famously had
in mind when using that term) (p. 491). This
brings Putnam to the topic of theological language, and in particular to
accounts like Maimonides’ negative theology and Aquinas’s notion of the
analogical use of language.

The development
of such accounts reflects the fact that, as Putnam puts it, “the monotheistic
religions passed -- irreversibly, I believe -- from thinking of God in
anthropomorphic terms to thinking of God as a transcendent being” (p.
493). Putnam notes that some
contemporary religious thinkers seem to have forgotten the reasons for this development. He cites “a distinguished Christian
philosopher” -- Putnam doesn’t name the person -- who once opined to Putnam
that worries about theological language were due to a “hang-up” the medievals
had about divine simplicity. When asked
by Putnam whether God might be said, then, to have distinct states of
consciousness which succeed each other in time, this philosopher responded “Why
not?” When Putnam suggested that thereby
putting God within time would implicitly be to deny God’s transcendence, this
philosopher, Putnam says, had no reply.

In fact, in
Putnam’s view, the medievals’ concern with divine simplicity was no mere
“hang-up” but has a serious theological basis.
Giving up simplicity threatens not only God’s transcendence but his
necessity too, and thus threatens to turn God into a mere “gaseous vertebrate”
(as Putnam puts it, borrowing a vivid phrase from Haeckel), one mere creature
alongside others. But divine simplicity does
make theological language problematic, which is what led thinkers like
Maimonides and Aquinas to their respective theories of such language.

So far
Putnam sounds very close indeed to a Thomist, speaking up as he does for a
correct understanding of causal
proofs of God’s existence and for the classical
theist conception of God’s nature.
However, he refrains from going the whole hog, in two respects. For one thing, though he thinks that theological
language is, despite its problematic nature, both intelligible and different
from other sorts of language, he is skeptical of both Maimonides’ and Aquinas’s
specific ways of understanding it. For
another, he seems to think the Thomist position a bit too rationalist.

Consider
first Putnam’s criticisms of Maimonides’ and Aquinas’s accounts of theological
language. Putnam briefly comments that
Maimonides’ negative theology “leaves it unintelligible why we should say the things we do about God” (p.
495). He does acknowledge that
Maimonides allows that we can speak of God in terms of his different actions,
but to Putnam this “seems like a failure to carry though his negative theology
to the end” (p. 496). (Putnam had more
to say about Maimonides’ negative theology in another 1997 article, in Faith
and Philosophy.)

Regarding
Aquinas’s account of analogical language about God, Putnam thinks that, at
least read one way, it collapses into Maimonides’ position that we can speak of
God in terms of his actions. But this, I
think, is not correct. As I understand
Maimonides’ account of our talk about God’s actions (which I discussed in this
post from a couple of years ago), when we speak of God’s various actions we
are in the strict sense not really saying anything about God himself, but rather only about his effects. But on Aquinas’s
analogical account of theological language, we are (at least often) saying things about God himself, and not just
about his effects (even if the different predications we make do not pick out
distinct parts of God). That is to say,
on Maimonides’ position, theological language, even in the case of descriptions
of divine action, does not really tell us anything positive about the divine
nature itself, whereas for Aquinas it does, at least to a limited extent.

However,
Putnam does also consider the role “proportion” plays in Aquinas’s conception
of analogical language, and offers as an example the claim that God’s knowledge is to God as Socrates’
knowledge is to Socrates. But the
problem with this, Putnam says, is that there is no single way Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates, and surely God’s
knowledge is not to God in every way
that Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates.

The trouble
with Putnam’s objection, though, is that it is difficult to know what to make
of it, because it is underdeveloped.
Both his description of Aquinas’s position and his criticism of it are
brief and vague.

The kind of
proportionality that Thomists think is relevant to understanding theological
language is what is called proper
proportionality, of which there are three key features. First, with the analogy of proper
proportionality, a term is being used to name something that is intrinsic to all the things being
referred to. For example, when we say
that a plant, an animal, a human being, an angel, and God all have life, we are
using the term “life” analogically, but we are nevertheless referring to
something intrinsic to each of the things talked about. (Contrast this with the analogy of attribution, where a term is not being used to name something intrinsic to all the things
referred to. For instance, if I say that
Socrates is healthy and that his food is healthy, it is only Socrates who has
health intrinsically, and his food is “healthy” only insofar as it causes
health in him.)

Secondly,
with the analogy of proper proportionality, a term is being used literally rather than
metaphorically. In the example just
referred to, each of the things named is literally
said to have life, even if “life” is not being used univocally or in exactly
the same sense. (Contrast this with the analogy of improper or metaphorical
proportionality, as when we say “That tree is an oak” and “Wyatt is an oak”
-- meaning, in the second case, not that Wyatt is literally a kind of tree, but
that he has a steadfast character.)

The third
feature (and the one Putnam cursorily refers to) is that with the analogy of
proper proportionality, a term is not being used to name something that is
exactly the same in each thing being talked about (as it is when we are
speaking in a univocal way) but rather to name something in one that bears a
“proportional similarity” to something that exists in another. For example, when I say that “I see the desk
in front of me” and “I see that Aquinas’s argument is valid,” the term “see” is
not being used univocally, since the “seeing” the eyes do is very different
from the “seeing” that the intellect does.
Still, the eyes are to a tree as the intellect is to the validity of an
argument, so that the word “seeing” properly applies to both. (See pp. 256-63 of my Scholastic
Metaphysics for further discussion of analogical language.)

Now, with
all of this in mind, what exactly is Putnam’s objection? He says that there is no single way Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates, and that God’s
knowledge is not to God in every way
that Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates.
But what exactly is it that he has in mind that would apply to the case
of Socrates but not to the case of God? In
particular, if we exclude features that some things have only relationally
rather than intrinsically, or only metaphorically rather than literally -- as
we would have to do when we are talking about the analogy of proper
proportionality rather than the analogy of attribution or the analogy of
improper proportionality -- what exactly is left that Putnam thinks would still
apply in the case of Socrates but not in the case of God? Moreover, even if God’s knowledge is not to
God in every way that Socrates’ knowledge
is to Socrates, why wouldn’t there being some
ways that God’s knowledge is to God as Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates
suffice to justify the predication of knowledge to God according to the analogy
of proper proportionality?

Putnam
doesn’t address such questions, so, again, it is hard to know what to make of
his objection.

Now, despite
his criticisms of Aquinas, Putnam nevertheless holds that it is possible to talk intelligibly about
God, that we have to understand theological language as “sui generis” rather
than either equivocal or straightforwardly univocal, and that contrary to the
simplistic conception of the literal use of language presupposed by too many
contemporary philosophers, “there is no one
form of discourse which is in some absolute sense ‘literal’” (p. 497, emphasis
added). So far that might make his
position sound close to Aquinas’s view of analogical language after all. But Putnam also says:

In my view, if there is one thing
that there isn’t going to be a scientific theory of (either in the Aristotelian
or in the contemporary sense of “scientific theory”) it is how religious
language works, and how it connects us to God. (p. 497)

and

I feel that insofar as I have any
handle on these notions, I have a handle on them as religious notions, not as notions which are supported by an independent
philosophical theory. (Certainly not by the theory of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.)
For me the “proofs” show conceptual connectionsof great depth and significance, but
they are not a foundation
for my religious belief… Nor are “proofs”
the way in which I wouldtry to bring someone else to Judaism, or to religious belief of any kind. (p. 490)

It is this
resistance to theory, and to
understanding philosophy as an intellectual bridge between the religious
believer and the non-believer, that marks the key difference between Putnam and
Thomism. As he sums up his position:

I would
say that I cannot explain how [theological language] works except in religious terms, by showing how the use of those terms figures
in my religious life, showing how projecting those terms from my non-religious
to my religious life is an essential part of that life. And neither can I explain what I mean by
‘God’, except by showing how my use of
the term figures in my religious life -- and that is not something I can
do at just any time or to any person. Of
course, this disbars me from claiming that I can “prove” that God exists to an
atheist. But I have already indicated that that is not a claim that I think a
religious person should make. (p. 498)

Rather, says
Putnam:

I am inclined to say… that while the potentiality for religious language, the possibility of making it one’s own, is a
basic human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real
possibility for every human being at every time… I myself believe that it
requires something experiential and
not merely intellectual to awaken that possibility in a human being… But what if the belief in God were simply a belief
in the strength of a certain philosophical argument?... On the supposition that
that is all that was going on, I would say that this was not belief in God at
all, but a metaphysical illusion. (p. 492)

Once again, Putnam’s
position is a bit too vague to know exactly what to make of it, but it seems clear
enough that what he evinces here is the very common attitude that religion is
ultimately more a matter of the heart than of the head. The idea seems to be that proofs of God’s
existence and philosophical analysis of the divine nature, while salutary and
important, are, ultimately, compelling only when viewed from the standpoint of
someone already attracted to a religious way of life. How one comes to be attracted to it in the
first place is, in Putnam’s view, an “experiential” matter.

What sorts
of experience Putnam has in mind is not entirely clear -- perhaps it is ethical
experience or aesthetic experience, or perhaps he sees religious experience as
something sui generis. The fact that he uses the specific term
“religious” to pick out what he wants to distinguish from philosophy and
metaphysics, and the influence that Wittgenstein’s writings on religion have
had on him (as is evident from some of Putnam’s other work), incline me to
think that he probably regards religious experience as sui generis. In any event,
variations on this “more heart than head” theme are a staple of modern
theology, from Pascal to Schleiermacher to Maurice Blondel to David Bentley
Hart.

There is,
from a Thomistic point of view, a deep problem in this, and also a deep irony. The problem is this. From the Thomistic point of view, Putnam’s
bifurcation of religion and metaphysics, and of the “experiential” and the “intellectual,”
is simply false, and certainly question-begging. For according to the doctrine of the
transcendentals -- a key part of Thomistic metaphysics -- being, unity, truth,
goodness, and (on at least some versions of the doctrine) beauty, are all
convertible, the same thing looked at from different points of view. Hence when the will is drawn toward God as
the highest good, or our affective nature delights in God as supremely
beautiful, they are not grasping something different from what the Thomist
theologian describes as Being Itself, or the Neo-Platonic philosopher
characterizes as the supreme unity, or the rationalist philosopher conceives of
as the Sufficient Reason for the existence of things. These are all just
different avenues to one and the same divine reality.

Hence it
simply cannot be the case (contrary
to what “more heart than head” types seem to think) that to yearn for God as
the highest good or to experience him as supreme beauty is necessarily deeper or more profound or genuine than to know him
intellectually as the First Cause, as Being Itself, etc. And while it is true that when we are drawn
to God, the will and affective side of our nature do indeed tend to operate no
less than the intellect does, that is not because the former alone are doing the
“real” work, but rather because since being, truth, goodness, beauty, etc. are
convertible, what the intellect grasps as true and real is, unsurprisingly,
also going to attract the will under the guise of goodness, and our affective
nature under the guise of beauty. To be
sure, human beings being as diverse as they are, some people are bound to be drawn
to God more under the guise of goodness
or beauty than under the more philosophical guises of First Cause, Sufficient
Reason, or what have you. Nothing necessarily
wrong with that. But the more metaphysical
conceptions are hardly less legitimate, or somehow second-class -- nor could they be given that we are essentially
rational animals.

Indeed,
there is a sense in which the
metaphysical conceptions are more fundamental.
The transcendentals are transcendental properties of being -- truth is being as
intelligible, the good is being as
desired by the will, and so forth.
But being is the characteristic subject matter of metaphysics. Hence to understand how the various guises
under which we grasp God -- as Being Itself, as the highest good, as supremely
beautiful, etc. -- all fit together requires metaphysical inquiry. Moreover, to understand why goodness, beauty,
etc. are not mere subjective reactions that we project onto the world, but are
genuine features of reality itself, also requires understanding their relation
to being.

Hence while
Putnam is certainly correct to think that a purely philosophical approach to religion
would be gravely deficient, it goes too far to suggest that it would be a
“metaphysical illusion.” On the
contrary, without metaphysics, it is the purely ethical and/or affective
approaches to religion which stand in danger of being exposed as illusory. This is by no means to say that most or even
very many religious believers ought to be expected to pursue philosophy, or are
even capable of doing so. But somebody had better be able and willing
to do it. Metaphysics must always be a
part of religion even if it is not the whole of it.

So, from a
Thomistic point of view, the “more heart than head” attitude to religion, in
its various forms -- fideist, voluntarist, relativist, Wittgensteinian, etc. --
reflects various philosophical errors, and certainly begs the question against Thomism,
which rejects the bifurcations that the attitude rests on.

I also said
that there is a deep irony in Putnam’s position, and the irony is this: Putnam
himself attacked at least one of the philosophical errors that often underlies
the “more heart than head” attitude toward religion, namely the “fact/value
dichotomy.” (This attack even gave
Putnam the
title for one of his books.) If we
think, as Hume does, of “value” as something essentially disconnected from the
objective “facts” grasped by reason, then naturally the ethical and aesthetic
side of religion (the “value” or “heart” side) is going to seem essentially
disconnected from the metaphysical side (the “fact” or “head” side). But to reject this Humean position is to open
the door once again to the doctrine of the transcendentals, and to see thereby
that the ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical aspects of religion -- the
“heart” and the “head” -- cannot be separated.

Hence, from
a Thomistic point of view, Putnam -- whose defense of the legitimacy of the
traditional proofs, attack on the fact/value dichotomy, and critique of
contemporary naturalism all evince a willingness seriously to question the
orthodoxies of modern philosophy -- should have pursued this questioning just a
little bit further.

More could
be said about Putnam’s engagement with analytical Thomism -- for example, about
the exchange between Putnam and John Haldane in the recent Library of Living Philosophers volume on The
Philosophy of Hilary Putnam -- but I’ll leave it at that for now.

11 comments:

"I would say that I cannot explain how [theological language] works except in religious terms, by showing how the use of those terms figures in my religious life, showing how projecting those terms from my non-religious to my religious life is an essential part of that life. And neither can I explain what I mean by ‘God’, except by showing how my use of the term figures in my religious life -- and that is not something I can do at just any time or to any person. Of course, this disbars me from claiming that I can “prove” that God exists to an atheist. But I have already indicated that that is not a claim that I think a religious person should make. (p. 498)

Rather, says Putnam:

I am inclined to say… that while the potentiality for religious language, the possibility of making it one’s own, is a basic human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real possibility for every human being at every time… I myself believe that it requires something experiential and not merely intellectual to awaken that possibility in a human being… But what if the belief in God were simply a belief in the strength of a certain philosophical argument?... On the supposition that that is all that was going on, I would say that this was not belief in God at all, but a metaphysical illusion. (p. 492)"

This seems like the typical American pragmatism and corresponding distrust of the universality of reason. What are we to make of philosophical statements like Moses', "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD", and St. Paul's, "For in him we live, and move, and are"? Are these statements not philosophical in that they appeal to men's reason, to their understanding? Even if they are speaking ultimately on their prophetic or apostolic authority and not on the authority of reason, yet they still appeal to the understanding. According to American pragmatism, Moses shouldn't have said that God is One, he should have embodied God's "oneness" in his own "living", and that would have demonstrated that God was One better than any appeal to the mind; St. Paul shouldn't have said that we exist in God, he should have just lived a godly life and let that speak for itself. It's this typical Anglo pig-headedness which sneers at "abstraction" and will hear only about what is "practical". There's also a kind of sentimentalism implied in it too: my religion shouldn't be reduced to cold philosophical abstractions, because they don' capture the wonderful experiences I have in my religion. Well, just because one uses philosophical abstraction to support one's religious beliefs, does not mean that one reduces the whole of one's religion to such abstractions; there's a difference between being a natural theologian like Aristotle, and a practicing Catholic like St. Thomas, yet St. Thomas didn't have problems in borrowing from Aristotle.

===

Analogical language in describing God is interesting. I don't like negative theology which states that God can only be distinguished by what he isn't, because I think it's more true to say that God is a divine fullness than a divine emptiness or void, which is where negative theology seems naturally to lead.

For example, "God is life". Though God does not live in the same way that animals live. What is life? I would say that life is the quality of self-motion. A living substance is one that moves itself internally, is the efficient cause of its own motions. This does not apply univocally to God, because God does not move. But he is in a sense self-moving, and is the supreme self-mover above all living creatures, in that he is perfectly his own cause.

"What sorts of experience Putnam has in mind is not entirely clear -- perhaps it is ethical experience or aesthetic experience, or perhaps he sees religious experience as something sui generis. The fact that he uses the specific term “religious” to pick out what he wants to distinguish from philosophy and metaphysics, and the influence that Wittgenstein’s writings on religion have had on him (as is evident from some of Putnam’s other work), incline me to think that he probably regards religious experience as sui generis. In any event, variations on this “more heart than head” theme are a staple of modern theology, from Pascal to Schleiermacher to Maurice Blondel to David Bentley Hart."

That is what usually comes most readily to mind, given the faith vs reason dichotomy we are all familiar with.

Add to that formula of the will or right to believe, seen of course as a kind of inalienable human right to delusional self-consolation as a coping method, and you have pretty much the standard framework. And I think, it is a framework more or less tacitly endorsed by many Christians with fideist leanings.

Nonetheless, it might be that Putnam has something in mind of a more phenomenological and less emotion driven content: i.e., of a confrontation with being, in the sense of being led by some event to advert to the startling fact that "we are", as Gilson would put it.

Putnam might have in mind an experiential event which could be described as similar to the events - life crises or not - which cause that surprising adverting to, the mental apprehension of, or the appreciation that, "being is": a sudden, often startling, apprehension or appreciation which is described by so many phenomenological philosophers.

I think Putnam needed to draw on the concept of connaturality to clarify his position. Broadly understood, connaturality is the idea that a seeker of knowledge has to be in tune with the source of knowledge in order to receive it. No philosophical argument, no personal testimony, and no presentation of the evidence for the resurrection would have convinced Saul of Tarsus that he was wrong about Christianity. What was necessary was a life changing experience, One's own experience trumps everything else. Putnam was vague but correct in his remarks on experience. It is not a question of heart knowledge being more important than head knowledge. All our knowledge gets filtered through one's lived experience.

Awesome. Thanks so much for these posts. I learn so much from them and I tell my wife about them all the time. I am also starting to introduce my 4 year old daughter (don't worry i am not over whelming her) to some of the metaphysical concepts involved in classical theism. My wife think's she'll grow up to think daddy's funny but i think it'll make her a smarter person a more rational thinker and hopefully a better and life long Christian.

The Thomistic understanding of analogical language is both more complex and more subtle than many commentators on it realize. Witness the variety of interpretations of it in the lterature; from Cajetan through James Anderson's Bond of Being, to George Klubertanz's St. Thomas on Analogy and Ralph McInerny's Aquinas and Analogy. Professor has provided a reasonably good summary of the majority view on what Thomas meant.

Always interesting to read about folks who are genuinely trying to enter into dialogue with Aristotelian/Thomisic philosophy.

This discussion reminds me a lot of By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas by Michael S. Sherwin. He has a great discussion of the interplay of the will and the intellect / love and knowledge. I wish I had more time to absorb it. But the way one resolves this question has a massive impact on one's theology and philosophy.

I realize that this is off-topic, but perhaps it would be timely for Dr. Feser to make a post on the metaphysics of gender, by which I mean: an A-T explication of what makes a man a man, and a woman a woman, as well as a rebuttal to the claim that someone having a male body and a "female brain" makes them, in fact a female.

In short, I think it would be fruitful to see an A-T handling of the whole transgender question.

When you are talking about men and women, it is important to keep your eye steadily on final cause, the cause of causes. Men are oriented towards reproducing through an act that is relatively brief and takes place outside their bodies. They do not have an intimate bodily relationship with their children. Therefore any relationship with their children tends to be mediated by things like law and covenant. Women are oriented towards reproducing through an sexual act that takes place inside their bodies and which results in an immediate, direct and ongoing body to body relationship with their children that involves feeding the child directly from their own body. This continues after birth with nursing. This is the essential difference between men and women.

This is true even if there is a breakdown or failure to develop in a person's reproductive organs. We can tell what a womb or penis is for, even if it doesn't work or doesn't work anymore. We can also tell what having an X or Y chromosome (in a particular spot) is for too. That is oriented towards developing either a woman or man.

Intersex people are also not . They aren't some magical third kind of being with wholly other kinds of body parts, but rather they combine recognizably male and female body parts in one person. It is a matter of some controversy whether these persons are really, in fact, either male or female. But even if they really are some combination of male and female, their bodies are not some wholly other thing nor are they on some supposed continuum.

Statistical differences in personality and behaviour (or even in physical characteristics) flow from this essential difference, but are not identical with it. Many women have some stereotypically masculine interests and personality traits, and vice versa, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. There are many suites of traits that can get the job of being a man or woman done, so to speak. Though, of course, there can be suites of traits that can be a hindrance to fulfilling your purpose as a man or woman too, and ought to be corrected. Traditional societies will often tend to steer people towards a suite of traits that works for being a man or woman in their particular circumstances.

Anyway, a bit of a sketch. There is a blogger called Alastair Roberts who writes a lot on these issues. Well worth seeking out.

"But somebody had better be able and willing to do it. Metaphysics must always be a part of religion even if it is not the whole of it."

I am late to this thread, but I certainly agree with this point. I think "heart" people miss that a passion for encountering the divine must involve the head must as the heart.

"Absorb my mind" - this is from a prayer of St. Francis (not one he wrote, but prayed, I believe.)

I was a physics major in college and a computer programmer after that - an environment filled with big egos (physics is the superior science, don't you know?) and so immersed in materialism that no other light was allowed in. It's been years since I read any philosophy (busy raising 6 children) but I did read quite a bit before I converted because I needed to know that it was rational to believe that God exists. I am now just relearning much of what I have forgotten - and all the new arguments in the nearly 30 years since that time.

While I don't believe that God can ever be "proved" to exist because of our human limitations, I do think our desire to unite with God means pursuing him intellectually as well as in every other way available to us.

So, thanks for taking it up.

"I believe that You, O Jesus, are in the most holy Sacrament. I love You and desire You. Come into my heart. I embrace You. Oh, never leave me. May the burning and most sweet power of Your love, O Lord Jesus Christ, I beseech You, absorb my mind that I may die through love of Your love, Who were graciously pleased to die through love of my love." (St. Francis)

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.